Phantoms can be seen as sensual phenomena that question the limits of knowledge. They are present in dreams, states of inattention or absences of mind. That makes them both fascinating and dangerous objects, which have the power to lead the subject astray and provoke vertigo. The article discusses the important role that phantoms play in philosophy, literature, and film, with regards to the oscillation between appearance and reality, as well as fact and fiction. It shows how uncanny encounters with phantoms haunt Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Siegfried Kracauer’s essays and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film Phantom in different ways, and uses these encounters with the dark to reflect on the thinking about, writing on and seeing of phantoms.